Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have announced the discovery of three new “exotic particles” that could help explain how our universe came into being.
The new structures exist for just one hundred-thousandth of a billionth of a billionth of a second and are made of quarks, the smallest particles ever discovered.
Atoms contain smaller particles called neutrons and protons, each made up of three quarks, while this “exotic” matter is made up of four and five quarks — known as tetraquarks and pentaquarks.
The particles discovered are a new pentaquark and two tetraquarks, bringing the total number found at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland to 21.
The researchers are excited about their new findings because there are now enough of these particles to group them in a similar way to the chemical elements in the periodic table.
‘Finding exotic particles and measuring their properties will help theorists to model how these particles are made, the exact nature of which is largely unknown,’ said Chris Parkes, Professor of Experimental Particle Physics at the University of Manchester.
“It will also help to better understand the theory for common particles like the proton and the neutron.”
The latest discovery comes almost exactly 10 years after the Large Hadron Collider discovered the famous Higgs boson, dubbed the “God Particle.”
Revealing: Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have announced the discovery of three new ‘exotic particles’ that could help explain how our Universe formed
CERN is one of the largest scientific institutions in the world and home to over 2,000 scientists working on many physics projects. Pictured above is a chain of LHC dipole magnets in a tunnel at the end of the second long shutdown, when the facility at CERN was upgraded for a number of years to allow protons to be smashed together at much higher energies when Run 3 begins in July
THE HIGGS BOSON CARRIES MASS AND IS A FUNDAMENTAL PART OF THE STANDARD MODEL OF PARTICLE PHYSICS
The Higgs boson is an elementary particle – one of the building blocks of the universe according to the Standard Model of particle physics.
It was named after physicist Peter Higgs as part of a mechanism that explains why particles have mass.
According to the Standard Model, our universe consists of 12 matter particles – including six quarks and six leptons.
It also has four powers – gravity, electromagnetism, strong and weak.
Every force has a corresponding carrier particle, known as a boson, that acts on matter.
The theory held that the Higgs boson was responsible for mass transfer.
It was first proposed in 1964 and only discovered in 2012 – during a run of the Large Hadron Collider.
The discovery was so momentous that showing it didn’t exist would have meant tearing up the Standard Model and going back to the drawing board.
Exotic particles were first suspected by theorists about six decades ago, but it was only in the last 20 years that they have been observed by the Large Hadron Collider and other experiments.
Quarks are elementary particles and come in six flavors: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom.
They usually combine in groups of twos and threes to form hadrons, like the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei.
More rarely, however, they can also combine to form four-quark and five-quark particles, “tetraquarks” and “pentaquarks”. Quark particles are called hadrons.
While some theoretical models describe exotic hadrons as single units of tightly bound quarks, other models see them as pairs of standard hadrons loosely connected in a molecule-like structure.
Only time and further study of exotic hadrons will tell if these particles are one, the other, or both.
Most of the exotic hadrons discovered in the last two decades are tetraquarks or pentaquarks, containing a charm quark and a charm antiquark, with the remaining two or three quarks being an up, down, or strange quark, or an antiquark.
But in the last two years, the Large Hadron Collider has discovered different types of exotic hadrons.
Two years ago, it discovered a tetraquark made up of two charm quarks and two charm antiquarks, and two “open charm” tetraquarks made up of a charm antiquark, an up quark, a down quark, and an odd one antiquark exist.
And last year it found the first-ever instance of a “double open charm” tetraquark with two charm quarks and an up and a down antiquark.
Open charm means that the particle contains a charm quark without an equivalent antiquark.
The discoveries announced today by the Large Hadron Collider team include new types of exotic hadrons.
The first type observed from an analysis of negatively charged B meson “decays” is a pentaquark, which consists of a charm quark and a charm antiquark, as well as an up, a down, and a strange quark.
It is the first pentaquark to contain an odd quark, while the second type is a doubly electrically charged tetraquark.
It is an open charm tetraquark composed of a charm quark, a strange antiquark, an up quark and a down antiquark and together with its neutral counterpart in a joint analysis of positively charged and neutral B meson decays has been discovered.
The results, presented at a CERN seminar, will help physicists better understand how quarks combine to form these composite particles.
The news comes one day after the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson on July 4th.
The discovery of the Higgs boson in July 2012 forms the basis for the existence of all elementary particles in our universe. Pictured above is a visualization of an event recorded at the CMS detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. It shows the properties expected from the decay of the SM Higgs boson into a photon pair
The existence of the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle that is the carrier particle for the Higgs field, was first proposed in 1964 by British physicist Peter Higgs. Pictured above is Higgs, who received a Nobel Prize in Physics for his suggestion of the existence of the Higgs boson, at CERN in July 2012
The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 made headlines around the world and led to the award of Nobel prizes, including to the British theorist Peter Higgs.
Higgs first predicted the particle’s existence in the 1960s and theorized that we are surrounded by an ocean of quantum information known as the Higgs field.
Since its discovery, experiments at the Large Hadron Collider have studied the properties of this bizarre particle, so unstable it has never been observed directly.
The existence of the Higgs boson is one of the reasons why everything we see, including ourselves, all planets and stars, has mass and exists – hence it has been dubbed the “God Particle”.
The Large Hadron Collider Beauty (LHCb) collaboration that made the new discovery consists of more than 1,000 scientists from 20 countries around the world.
The collaboration built and operates one of the four large detectors at the particle accelerator CERN LHC.
It is led by Professor Parkes and the University of Manchester, which has more than 20 staff and PhD students working on the project.
WHAT IS THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER?
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world.
It is located in a 27-kilometer tunnel below the Swiss-French border.
The LHC started colliding particles in 2010. Within the 27 km long LHC ring, proton bundles travel at almost the speed of light and collide at four interaction points.
In the accelerator, two high-energy particle beams move at almost the speed of light before they collide. The jets travel in opposite directions in separate jet tubes.
They are guided around the accelerator ring by a powerful magnetic field maintained by superconducting electromagnets.
The LHC (pictured) was restarted on April 5, 2015 after being shut down for two years during a major £100million refurbishment project
The electromagnets are made up of coils of a special electric cable that operates in a superconducting state, efficiently conducting electricity without resistance or loss of energy.
These collisions create new particles that are measured by detectors surrounding the interaction points.
A view of the LHC’s Compact Muon Solenoid experiment is shown
By analyzing these collisions, physicists from around the world deepen our understanding of the laws of nature.
While the LHC is capable of generating up to 1 billion proton-proton collisions per second, the HL-LHC will increase that number, dubbed “luminosity” by physicists, by a factor of between five and seven, which about tenfold allows for data to be collected between 2026 and 2036.
This allows physicists to study rare phenomena and make more accurate measurements.
For example, in 2012, the LHC enabled physicists to discover the Higgs boson, making great strides in understanding how particles get their mass. The subatomic particle had long been theorized but was not confirmed until 2013.